Mumbai’s suburban rail passengers’ woes could get reduced with the Rail Ministry giving a go-ahead to the Mumbai Urban Transport Project Phase 3.
The third phase will develop a rail corridor between the northern suburbs of Panvel and Virar and a fast rail corridor on the harbour line of the city that links south Mumbai to the satellite town of Navi Mumbai. It also plans to extend harbour line services on Western Railways to Borivali from the existing Andheri. Additional lines between Kalyan-Kasara , Kalyan-Karjat are also part of this plan.
The estimated cost of the project is about ₹52,000 crore and will completed by 2031. Funding plans are yet to be firmed up. To de-congest Mumbai, the Railways also plans to complete the financial closure and award tenders for two elevated corridors – Churchgate-Virar and Mumbai CST-Panvel – by next fiscal besides raising platform height of suburban stations to minimise passenger deaths on tracks.
A terminus for south-bound trains at Panvel and another at Thakurli near Kalyan for north-bound trains has been planned to de-congest the existing terminal stations at Mumbai CST, Dadar and LTT.
The Railway Budget has also given a total outlay of ₹4,767 crore for FY17, a 10 per cent increase over last year. This has been done using a mix of capital allocation, extra budgetary resources from institutional financing and public private partnerships.
New works on 11 routes – Pune-Nashik, Vaibhavwadi-Kolhapur, 4th line between Jalgaon-Bhusawal, Daund-Manmad doubling, Manmad-Jalgaon 3rd line, Wardha-Nagpur 4th line, Indore-Manmad via Malegaon, Jeur-Aashti, Latur-Nanded via Loha, Ahmednagar, Gadchandur-Adilabad and Jalna-Khamgaon is being undertaken in FY17.